OK, so Amazon.com offers these “Daily Deals”, right? They pick some item, discount it, and sell a certain number of that item on a given day at the discounted price, until they run out.
Recently they offered a deal on an item that, by coincidence, I had purchased not long before at the regular Amazon price. This annoyed me, because I thought I had been getting a good deal at the regular price (well below MSRP), but they were now selling the same thing for about $20 less than that. I wanted to get in on the really good deal, not just the regular good deal - but of course there was no point in my buying one now, since I already had one.
Then a brilliant plan occurred to me: I could buy one at the discounted price, wait until they had sold out, and then sell it at the regular Amazon price on eBay - thus earning the difference between the sale and regular prices, and essentially reducing my own previously-paid price to equal the sale price, after the fact. But then an even more brilliant plan occurred to me: I could buy a whole bunch of them, wait until the sale was over, sell them on eBay at the regular Amazon price, and earn 20 bucks per unit profit.
So, not to be greedy, I ordered 5 units at a cost of close to $300, and sat down to wait to start shipping them out and earn mass profits. At some point I discovered that I had misremembered my original purchase price; the price differential was actually only $14, not $20, but still, I stood in the way to earn a cool 70 smackers, and that ain’t hay. And at any rate, I knew I had a guaranteed market at that price, since that’s the price they were currently selling for (non-discounted) on Amazon. What could go wrong?
Well, the first thing that went wrong, in fact the moment I clicked the “Buy” button on Amazon, was that I began to feel like a dick. Yes, it’s cool to find deals and it’s the American way to buy and sell schlock merchandise like a bazaar barker in desperate pursuit of the most minimal cash payout, but I realized that I was essentially taking advantage of Amazon’s discount offer to make a profit for myself - and because the discount sale quantity was limited, in doing so I was blocking someone else from getting a good deal who probably only wanted it to enjoy the item for themselves. You can argue that that’s just capitalism at work, but it’s (in a very, very tiny way) one of the ugly things I object to about the way capitalism works - that the constant grinding pursuit of self-interest in every way and form overrides even the most minimal sense of generosity toward others’ welfare. And here I was behaving like an oil company in a nature preserve, just to get 14 fucking dollars out of somebody who wasn’t fast enough to get the discount. So as soon as I had thought about it, I went back to my Amazon account to cancel the order - and found that, in less than 15 minutes, they had already begun processing the order and it couldn’t be canceled. So not only did I feel like a dick, but I couldn’t undickify myself.
So, I sat down again to wait, feeling guilty and wishing I wasn’t in this mess. I began to wonder if I should donate the profits to a charity or something.
Eventually, a big box arrived with 5 identical items in it, all duplicating the one already sitting on my shelf at home. I stashed it away guiltily and didn’t deal with it for a couple of weeks.
Big mistake.
Eventually, I entered 5 identical sale notices on eBay and sat down to wait some more, because it takes a week for the auctions to end. Now, I’m not stupid, right? - before I began this whole adventure I had checked sale prices on eBay and confirmed that they were doing a brisk business in this item, at prices roughly approximating the Amazon non-discounted price. In part because I had only previously sold things on eBay once or twice and didn’t really know the system, in part because I wasn’t sure it would help, I hadn’t specified a minimum sales price on the auctions - but what difference would it make? The going market price was well above my purchase price, so my profits were secure.
After entering my items for sale, I checked a few similar listings just to re-confirm that the market was strong. And then made a sickening discovery.
Somehow, in the intervening couple of weeks between ordering the items and placing them on eBay, the bottom had dropped out of the market for them. eBay sale prices were now running well under the Amazon non-discount price; “Buy It Now” offers at the Amazon price were going totally unclaimed, and some auctions were actually ending below the discounted price that I had paid! And because I hadn’t specified a minimum price, I could potentially lose almost everything I had paid! But I couldn’t do anything about it - if I waited longer, the price would probably just drop further, and I had to get as much of my $300 investment back as I could. So I left the auctions up and hoped I was just seeing a momentary aberration in sales prices.
I forced myself not to monitor the auctions more than once every day or so for the next week, but on the ending day I was mortified: every single auction had ended within a dollar or two of the Amazon discount price that I had already paid, and most of them had ended well below that - in one case almost $10 less! The total combined sales of all items was $25 less than I had paid for them at the discounted price! Luckily, I had specified a $10 flat shipping fee, thinking it would cost less than that, so I had some buffer room, but it wasn’t looking good.
And of course, three of my buyers were from the midwest - not cheap to ship to - and the rest were all from California - as far away as it’s possible to get in the 48 States. And then PayPal took about $2 off the top of each order they processed, and eBay itself charged me more than $3 per order in fees . . .
End result, after splurging on a bulk purchase of a highly popular item at deep discount, selling into a strong, virtually guaranteed market with demonstrated demand almost $20 above my break-even price point, and paying all associated transaction fees (including the cheapest possible shipping method, even at the risk of not keeping my promises regarding shipping dates, because every other alternative was a disaster): I still felt like a complete dick and I lost $18.81.
Which, paradoxically, had the effect of making me feel a lot less like a dick. Instead of elbowing out others’ discount purchases for my own benefit, I actually wound up subsidizing my buyers’ discounts to the tune of an average of $3.76 below my own purchase price - which would have been a substantial savings for any Amazon customer who had not paid for “free” Prime shipping privileges, and at worst no more than $2 above discount (and as much as $10 below) even for those who had. So I did shift the market from Amazon to eBay, which is not what Amazon wanted, but from the broad perspective the only real loser (in various senses) in this scenario is me. So I’m really a kind of altruist.
Great.
April 7th, 2008
|
General, I do too have a life, Economics, Math, Fiasco, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
6 comments
Peggy Noonan mostly praised Obama’s speech, and largely seemed to understand it, which puts her in a minority of conservative commentators. But she criticizes him, near the end of her article, for . . . wait for it . . . not understanding America. Yes, snotty Reaganite lickspittles who made a profession of courting racists and religious bigots with coded signals, demonizing “welfare queens”, glorifying death squads and Nazi war dead, excusing incompetence and ignorance at every turn, and obsessing over wayward blowjobs, now presume to tell candidates of the working-class party what the real America is all about.
March 21st, 2008
|
General, Politics, Church & State, Economics, Culture, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Torture |
9 comments
The news has been reporting for the last day or so on the plight of young Harry Windsor, Prince of Whateverthefuck and one of the few members of the British royal family who doesn’t turn your stomach merely by existing [oops - yes he is]. Bowing to his family’s destiny, Harry joined the Army, but it was made clear that his royal arse was much too precious ever to be exposed to combat. Legitimately, also, there were fears that the knowledge of his presence in a combat theater would subject his unit mates to increased danger as enemies from around the globe fell over each other to take the most exalted scalp since Mountbatten’s. The issue was especially poignant given the British Army’s long and less-than-exalted history in Afghanistan.
To his credit, he complained of being kept back, going so far as to threaten to resign his comission if he wasn’t allowed to play a full role. He was eventually shipped over - spending most of his time in a behind-the-lines role, but also going on patrols with his air-cav unit. The British press were briefed on his participation, under “embargo” conditions (they agree not to publish the information until given permission, in return for being informed). For less than three months, Harry was in the combat theater, if not exactly in frequent combat, and things were going OK.
Yesterday, Matt Drudge revealed these facts, and within 24 hours Harry was homeward-bound. It seems likely that Drudge was not subject to the embargo - that is, he did not personally agree to its terms - but likely got a leak and chose to publish the information anyway. That he was, in actual effect, working to get a prince of the British royal succession, and soldiers of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, killed, was apparently not a reason in his mind not to do so.
February 29th, 2008
|
General, Politics, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
37 comments
For the most unhinged pants-wetting alarmism in the face of imaginary terrorism, this year’s award goes to Bruce Kesler of the “Democracy Project“:
Stop arguing with your liberal friends about what a dangerous place the world is, and just send them this website. A friend just sent it to me. It’s called Global Incident Map: A Global Display of Terrorism and Other Suspicious Events.
You have to see it to believe it, and I really mean to believe it: The world is a very dangerous place.
It actually is a pretty interesting resource, though also somewhat alarmist. It features a world map with brightly-colored hazard symbols (Biohazard! Explosion! Fire! Electric Tram!) blinking and flashing at “hot spots” around the globe. Better is a dated list of “incidents” broken down by category, with links to further details, ranging back one week. If you’re interested in political violence, this looks like a good monitoring tool. It’s rather overwrought (what exactly I am supposed to feel in response to a blinking tram car symbol I just don’t know, and the Google satellite images of every location are cool but not particularly informative), but you can get good information out of it.
But, typically of the right-wing incitement-to-riot brigade, the message Kesler takes from it is just the opposite of what any rational analysis could possibly come up with.
Looking at the current page (it updates every 7 minutes), there are 77 incidents listed from around the entire world in the past week. That works out to about one incident per every 2 1/2 countries, per week. But in fact, only 26 unique countries are mentioned, most of them more than once. So according to this resource, there was no terrorism at all in over 80% of the nations of the world in the past week. And of the countries that are listed, the US and Israel acount for almost a third of all the incidents. So you’re down to about one incident per month per country, if you’re not a citizen of “greater USRael”.
But what of those incidents? Frankly, they’re pretty lame. Among the 77 “Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity” that Bruce Kesler is panicking over are such heart-stoppers as: “Contents of suspicous envelope handed over to [Irish police]”, “White powder at NAACP was harmless”, “Protester chained to railway line” and “Transpo[rtation] station back to normal after bomb scare”. Oh, my god! A transportation station was back to normal!? Somebody found a white powder that was harmless!? What a dangerous world we live in, with all this “Terrorism and Suspicious Activity” going on!
To be sure, many of the incidents listed are actual terrorism, some of them fatal. And the list is clearly woefully incomplete: it includes 10 incidents in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but every one has Palestinians as the suspected terrorists; there is not a single incident of Israeli violence against Palestinians listed. There are only 2 terrorist incidents listed in all of Iraq for the past week, but 14 throughout the continental US. So we can’t take this list as exhaustive, and, of course, no such violent incidents should be minimized no matter how distant or infrequent. But for all its flaws, this is the list that has Bruce Kesler in a tizzy - the one he says proves that “the world is a dangerous place”, the one you should monitor constantly to keep yourself in a keen pitch for the Wah on Terra:
There’s nothing I’ve ever experienced – short of actually experiencing war or terrorist incidents –that so brings the message home, literally, right to your computer, and so comprehensively, about the need to be vigilant. . . .
Simply amazing. Belongs on everyone’s computer screen.
So Bruce is going to spend his life being vigilant about what he sees on this map. OK . . . . Assuming every one of these often-laughable “Events” is actually a terrorist incident, and they each kill 10 people (most of them actually killed no one), and assuming for the sake of simplicity that they occur randomly throughout the world, and accepting the US Census Bureau’s estimated world population of 6.63 billion, that would give each person in the world a weekly chance of death by terrorism of . . . 0.0000011%, or about 0.0006% (1:166,667) annually. Assuming you live in the US (14 incidents), Israel (10 incidents, and a 100% victimization rate - not a single incident of violence that involves Israelis is their fault), India (7 incidents), or Afghanistan or Pakistan (5 incidents each), and taking the populations of those countries together (1.602 billion), that gives a likelihood of involvement in a “Terrorism Event” of 0.0000026% per week, or 0.00013% (1:769,230)annually, for citizens of these horribly dangerous countries. Those numbers constitute a “very dangerous” world for Bruce.
I hope nobody tells him, because he might die from simple fear, but here are some other things for Bruce to be vigilant about:
| Hideous Danger |
Yearly Death Rate |
| Terrorism |
1/769,230 |
| Liposuction |
1/5,000 |
| Pedestrian Accidents |
1/58,000 |
| Firearms |
1/366,000 |
| Recreational Boating |
1/399,000 |
| Bicycling |
1/410,000 |
Yes . . . the fear that gnaws at Bruce Kesler’s heart . . . at any moment he could be attacked by a terrorist, or 154 liposuction doctors. Tell your liberal friends.
UPDATE: Fixed minor errors and typos.
November 21st, 2007
|
General, Politics, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, News & Current Events, Math, Fiasco |
one comment
Widely seen, but worth linking: Dick Cheney on why occupying Iraq was an obviously bad idea.
[I]f we’d gone to Baghdad [in the first Gulf War] we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
Total US fatalities during Cheney’s second war in Iraq, to date: 3,689
Ratio with fatalities in first Gulf War: 12.6 : 1
US combat fatalities: 3,270
Ratio with first Gulf War: 22.6 : 1
“Coalition” fatalities: 297
Ratio with first Gulf War: 4.6 : 1
Other US casualties: 27,186
Ratio with first Gulf War: 183.7 : 1
US suicides: 118
Ratio with first Gulf War: unk.
Minimum reported Iraqi security force casualties: >7,350
Ratio with first Gulf War: N/A
(all sources as above)
Minimum reported Iraqi civilian fatalities beginning 2005: 65,000 - 76,000
Ratio with first Gulf War: approx. 20 : 1
You’re doing a heck of a job!
Hat Tip: Editor and Publisher
August 13th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Iraq, Media, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
2 comments
Though I doubt we share the same politics, and surely not the same enthusiasm for Bush’s murderous fiasco of an occupation of Iraq, I have been admiring Michael Yon’s reporting on urban fighting there. Yon is a self-funded blogger who traveled to Iraq on his own and managed to talk himself into an “embedment” as a journalist with several Army units involved in “the surge”. He’s been filing blog reports for most of the past two years, with a highly personalized, unit-level and sometimes soldier-level perspective and with an evocative and expressive prose style. He’s clearly drunk the military’s Koo-Aid, regarding both their tactics and their overall goals, but manages to maintain at least a degree of critical perspective; I think he reads like a modern-day Ernie Pyle (which I suspect he would think is an unmixed compliment, while I am not so sure). At any rate, it’s gripping and intrepid reporting.
His most recent dispatch, on atrocities against civilian villagers near Baqubah, is heartbreaking:
On 29 June, American and Iraqi soldiers were again fighting side-by-side as soldiers from Charley Company 1-12 CAV—led by Captain Clayton Combs—and Iraqi soldiers from the 5th IA, closed in on a village on the outskirts of Baqubah. The village had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road—about 3.5 miles from FOB Warhorse—that al Qaeda liked to bomb. Al Qaeda had taken over the village. As Iraqi and American soldiers moved in, they came under light contact; but the bombs planted in the roads (and maybe in the houses) were the real threat.
The firefight progressed. American missiles were fired. The enemy might have been trying to bait Iraqi and American soldiers into ambush, but it did not work. The village was riddled with bombs, some of them large enough to destroy a tank. One by one, experts destroyed the bombs, leaving small and large craters in the unpaved roads.
The village was abandoned. All the people were gone. But where? . . .
[Most of the rest of the text is captions of photos illustrating the article:]
“The houses all were empty. We passed by two donkeys each shot in the neck. Al Qaeda had killed their livestock.”
“Al Qaeda often plants bombs inside the dead bodies of the animals and people they’ve killed. They have rigged children’s bodies with explosives.”
“We walked into the palm groves nearby. There was a terrible stench. The heat and the vegetation reminded me of the Killing Fields in Cambodia where I had visited shortly before the most recent trip to Iraq.”
“Soldiers from 5th IA said they’d found some of the villagers: They were dead.”
“There were bodies of men, women and children. Al Qaeda slaughters families everywhere: as these graves were being unearthed, more bombs were found in London.”
“By the time I arrived, 5th IA had uncovered parts of six bodies. But from what I could see, they did not all appear to have been murdered at once. In one grave, there were exposed ribs and other bones, although there was still flesh on the bones.”
“Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children.”
The pictures are terrible.
And, predictably, they have been seized upon by the usual right-wing cheerleaders as “proof” not only that there are terrible people in Iraq who have been stirred into doing terrible things to each other, but that Bush’s war is somehow made necessary, or even reasonable, in light of such events.
Ed Morrisey, at Captain’s Quarters, sets the tone by uncritically accepting Yon’s interpretation of events, and then simply misunderstanding his text:
AQI forces massacred the men, women, and children of the village, burying most of them before the battle and their subsequent withdrawal. Michael’s pictures show very disturbing images of the victims of AQI. Michael told the Iraqi and American commanders on this mission that it was important that Americans see this, and he’s right.
And the title of the post? It comes from a favorite tactic of AQI in Iraq. They “bless” the corpses of children and dead animals with explosives — in order to kill anyone who attempts to clear them.
(Yon mentioned booby-trapping corpses, but said nothing about “blessing” them. I imagine the post title was simply a call-out to the saccharine pop song of the same name.)
JammieWearingFool’s emotions run away with him, perhaps understandably, but unquestioningly as well:
In words and photos Michael once again brings us the reality of the enemy we are fighting. It is not pretty and they are brutal. I have to wonder why Michael’s dispatch is not the lead item on every newscast. It is horrific and have we in genteel society simply become unwilling to face the evil in our midst? Are we so adverse to confrontation that simply ignoring or wishing away the Islamic fascists we can magically make this terror go away? Do we think that because it is happening half a world away that it can’t come here?
We go through our day to day lives and never give a second thought to what could be. If we joined in one voice and screamed from the rooftops as loudly as we do about Abu Gharib and Gitmo about the atrocities being committed in the name of a most unholy god could we knock it down and diminish it?
But it’s to The Corner, predictably, that we must turn for totally unrestrained gibbering on life-and-death issues of global import. Michael Ledeen lets it all hang out:
Yon’s latest provides a clear picture of the terrorists’ savage methods. Literally, because it’s mostly photographs of what happened to a village that fell into the claws of al Qaeda. They just tore apart the villagers, their livestock, their children and women, and then boobytrapped the area to try to kill our guys, knowing that they would honor the dead.
And then I think about the terrorists’ latest efforts in England and Scotland, where only innocents were targeted. And of course 9/11. And then I think of so many of our leaders, who seem to be preparing to retreat from Iraq (and therefore Afghanistan), thereby leaving the beasts, as Michael Yon properly calls them, an even broader area of operation.
And then I return to my mantra: the war is much bigger than iraq, we cannot win it in iraq alone, and there is no escape from this war. They are already here, and “bringing the boys home” will gain us nothing. It will only increase the number of victims.
I stopped saying “faster, please” some time ago, because it is obvious that W and his people are not going to take the proper actions against the terror masters. But we must be clear about the nature of the war and the bestial nature of our enemies.
Here again, Conservative Reading Comprehension Dysfunction makes itself felt: Yon’s reference to “beasts” was literal (the livestock that had been killed), not a description of the attackers. And I suppose it’s too obvious and too inevitable to even bother taking exception to his categorizing “their women” along with children and livestock as possessions of “the villagers” (none of whom, apparently, are women). As to who, exactly, is “already here”, what that has to do with these killings in Iraq, and how he knows or imagines there is any link between this incident and the London bombings, is as much a mystery to us as it probably is to him.
But the real problems with all these reactions, and with Yon’s post itself, is their uncritical and apparently unaware interpretation of the real horrors Yon documents.
Every one of these commentators attributes these atrocities to “al Qaeda”; only one even references “AQI”, or “al Qaeda in Iraq”, and then without bothering to distinguish them from al Qaeda proper. But AQI is not al Qaeda; it is simply another name for the pre-existing terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (under new management since his death, and recently having changed its name again, as the supposed government of the “Islamic State of Iraq”). Zarqawi issued a statement of allegiance to Bin Laden when he assumed the name “AQI”, but there are no known connections between them; AQI is almost entirely composed of native Iraqis. It is a Sunni insurgent group that formally declared war on all Shiite Iraqis and Sunni collaborators. In other words . . . it’s the insurgency of deposed Sunnis that we created when we invaded Iraq and overthrew the Sunni government. And, as Wikipedia explains, Baquba is on the edge of the Sunni enclave, and has been subject to Sunni expansionist assaults for years.
It appears that Yon is simply adopting the US military tactic of declaring anyone in Iraq who does not support them to be “al Qaeda”, thereby enabling themselves to claim they are “fighting al Qaeda” while occupying the wrong country. Even Yon only has the second-hand word of the (notoriously unreliable) Iraqi forces as to who was responsible for the deaths they discovered, and those soldiers had no information on the incident at all - they just saw the dead bodies. But the US is happy with the Iraqis - who know which side of their bread is buttered, and who’s handing out the butter - when the Iraqis tell them they are fighting “al Qaeda”, the US is happy with itself when it can claim to be fighting al Qaeda, and Yon is all too happy to work it into his own pre-conceived narrative.
In fact, it seems obvious that these deaths are far more likely part of the ongoing Iraqi sectarian civil war, the work of the home-grown Sunni insurgency that didn’t exist until we kick-started it by invading the country, creating a power vacuum, and trying to take sides in the resulting scramble for domination. As horrible as these killings are, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever, and certainly Yon presents none except the unsupported word of some Iraqi soldiers traveling with the Americans when the bodies were found, that they were the work of al Qaeda - and in a country in the midst of a raging religious civil war, in territory that is the documented fighting ground of a large and vicious sectarian guerrilla group that has nothing to do with al Qaeda but is known for atrocities against both Sunni and Shiite civilians, “al Qaeda” would seem to be the least likely explanation.
Not only do none of the conservative commentators even raise this question, the one who does name AQI as the likely perpetrators then does not repudiate the claim about al Qaeda! And all agree - in some cases in quite distraught terms - that this internal sectarian struggle of our own making is the reason we need to keep fighting “al Qaeda” in Iraq, because otherwise “al Qaeda” will attack us in America. None seems to imagine that these deaths wouldn’t have occurred if we hadn’t started the civil war in which they took place, or that continually instigating violent unrest in someone else’s country, to protect our own, is essentially to choose more and more of such atrocities as a means of perpetuating Bush’s self-declared victory against imaginary enemies both there and here.
Yon is doing vital work in bringing such horrors to light. But he would be doing a much greater service - and perhaps allay some of Michael Ledeen’s confusion about who is “over there” and who is “already here”, as well as the (undoubtedly non-existent) link between sectarian violence in Iraq and global terrorism in London - if he would tell the story straigher, plainer, and truer:
“Religious extremists seeking to secure power after we destroyed Iraq’s government have been waging an ongoing sectarian civil war, including terrorist tactics against religious non-conformists, in Iraq since shortly after the occupation began. Baquba has long been a center of such sectarian violence, attributed to local Sunni insurgents who have openly declared their intentions in this regard. This incident is of a piece with similar atrocities attributed to the insurgency, and there is no evidence to suggest it is in any way linked with al Qaeda proper. Continuing US efforts to quell the insurgency by violence have served as a recruiting tool for the sectarian groups and inflamed further violence against both US forces and local collaborators, resulting in reprisal killings similar to those seen in this latest incident.”
July 1st, 2007
|
General, Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
5 comments
Tom Tomorrow’s latest unpatriotic outrage is up at HufPo. It consists of nothing but the actual words of chickenhawk blowhards congratulating themselves on their splendid little war, 4 years ago next month.
“Military action will not last more than a week.” [Bill O’Reilly]
“Pop psychology [says] that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni. . . . There’s almost no evidence of that.” [Bill Kristol]
“The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics’ complaints.” [Tony Snow]
“The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are Upper West Side liberals . . .” [Charles Krauthammer]
. . . and so on . . .
(Hey, Chuck, I didn’t move to the Upper West Side - and almost immediately get evicted - for two more years. I thought you were an ass anyway, and still do.)
My God, where does he come up with such things?!
April 26th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Culture, Iraq, Media, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
2 comments
Charles Karel Bouley, at the Huffington Post, has a lacerating column today that is breathtaking for its incisiveness and audacity.
He riffs on the recent cancer-related stories in the media, and has a few testy things to say about Tony Snow, so, unquestionably, the wingers will quote two angry sentences from it, dump their usual vitriol on the blogger, and scamper, still blissfully oblivious. But for those who can read and think and who try to care, here’s the medicine you need:
if [CNN] wants to do some good, they’ll talk about the real cancers in this country, and there are plenty; no, not the tumors growing in Elizabeth or the lesions in Tony Snow, but the terminal cancers festering in the political system, in the heartland of America, and on the news networks.
First, let’s talk about the cancer that is festering in the American news media. . . . Our news is one step short of Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition or American’s Most Wanted. Our journalists don’t ask tough questions, don’t do much research, take press releases as fact, report things from the web that have no basis in fact, and if a celebrity OD’s they go in to overdrive. And we, the nation, are dying because of this. . . .
What about the cancer that is in Washington D.C. these days? We’ll call it elected official fearanoma. I openly laughed this week when I read the Chuck Hagels interview where he said that if things don’t change he’s aware that impeachment is a possible solution. . . . So, Mr. Hagel, you FINALLY read the Constitution? It just dawned on you that impeachment is an option when the president has become a dictator? Please, keep reading, it’s a good document. . . . [B]ecause some of you are running for president, others running for reelection and yet others living in some haze of complacency. Your cancer is terminal. You are weakened by it and do nothing. You’re not taking aggressive steps to cure it.
And then there’s the possibly terminal case of Lack of Reality Carcinoma. We are at war and we, the people, sacrifice nothing, demand nothing, expect nothing. Instead of tax increases, you get a tax break. Instead of demanding that Hummer stop producing their gas guzzling completely unnecessary vehicles for the self indulgent and retool their factories to make the Cougar vehicles that are needed in Iraq to keep our troops safe from IEDs you rent limos made of these beasts . . . . Your light bill should be double, the same with gas at the pump. Why? To make the companies switch to green fuels, renewable resources. Most of you haven’t called your power company to see if you are getting greener energy, don’t know your carbon imprint on the planet, nothing. Why is this important? Because Osama attacked us because we have bases is Saudi Arabia. We are at war in Iraq protecting oil reserves and are about to go to war with Iran. We need to leave the middle east entirely and that means leave their oil behind. Not in 100 years, but now. We have the technology, but you have to pay for it. And you won’t. Do you go to city council meetings and demand that all new construction in your city is energy self-sufficient? Have you priced solar for your home? Do you drive a hybrid if you can? What’s the last thing you said to your Congressman? Senator? Sacrifice, we simply haven’t. Most of you haven’t even sacrificed your children, and that includes George Bush. For most of you, it ’s not your kids fighting. No, the cancer of apathy, of gluttony, of conspicuous consumption grows stronger every day. . . .
It is not a given that the U.S. will remain the world’s super power forever. In fact, history says it won’t. If we don’t cure these aggressive cancers growing in our media, in our government and in our society, we will fade away and become a shell of what we once were.
There’s more. Read it.
March 27th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Economics, Environment, Culture, Iraq, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Climate Change |
6 comments
This is weird. I just read a George Will column that was thoughtful, humane, and not snotty. I’m confused.
Maybe it’s Opposite Day! (Hmmm . . . no, I got 80% on the Asshole Test. It’s not Opposite Day.)
Well, whatever caused it, he deserves credit for it and I hope they keep putting the same stuff in his porridge at the Cranky Old Weenies Conservative Pundit Rest Home.
Will takes note of the Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, based on actual letters written by Japanese troops facing an invasion they knew they would almost certainly not survive. He praises the film for seeing a common humanity between the American and Japanese forces, and acknowledges that that attitude was not prevalent during the war itself:
Even during the war there was empathy for civilian victims, at least European victims. . . .
But attitudes about the Japanese were especially harsh during the war and have been less softened by time. During the war, it was acceptable for a billboard - signed by Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey - at a U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific to exhort “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs.”
Killing America’s enemies was Halsey’s trade. His rhetoric, however, was symptomatic of the special ferocity, rooted in race, of the war against Japan: “We are drowning and burning them all over the Pacific, and it is just as much pleasure to burn them as to drown them.” . . .
In 1943, the Navy’s representative on the committee considering what should be done with a defeated Japan recommended genocide - “the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.”
But he also notes that it is possible to rise above those views, and it is a test of a civilization whether they are able to do so:
Perhaps empathy for the plight of the common enemy conscript is a postwar luxury; it certainly is a civilized achievement, an achievement of moral imagination that often needs the assistance of art. That is why it is notable that “Letters From Iwo Jima” was one of five films nominated for Best Picture. . . .
Japanese forces frequently committed barbarities worse even than those of the German regular army, and it is difficult to gauge the culpability of conscripts commanded by barbarians. Be that as it may, the pathos of the letters humanizes the Japanese soldiers, whose fatalism was a reasonable response to the irrational.
He goes on to say that Eastwood’s film is a sign that America as a whole is finally catching up to its most enlighted heroes of the past. I suspect he’s right, or I hope so at least.
Will quotes Stephen Hunter, film critic for the Washington Post, as saying that there are only 4 among over 600 English-language films set in WWII that show the Japanese in a human light.* Hunter himself makes a more complex point:
Any look at the movies made during the war itself confirms this portrait. Our filmmakers, enraged over Pearl Harbor, seemingly always included a signature scene where Japanese perfidy expressed itself, only to be wiped out most satisfyingly by the righteousness of our soldiers. . . .
When you look at this kind of hate-fueled agitprop today, it’s easy to be embarrassed. And though it may not be a politically correct thing to suggest, try to imagine how Americans felt immediately after Pearl Harbor, and the images of “hordes,” “monkeys” and Japanese officers as decadent aristocrats, though ugly, may be viewed as cathartic, perhaps even necessary for military victory. Demonization of the enemy is one part of war.
He’s certainly right that it’s a common part of war. I don’t agree that it’s a necessary part, or at least it seems to me that, to the extent that it’s psychologically necessary as a motivation, the war is either being fought without justification or the troops and recruits are incapable of the necessary moral imagination to understand either why the war is justified or who it is they’re fighting.
What’s interesting, though, is to compare this pattern with the one emerging from the Iraq fiasco. Hunter notes that it was only 15 years after WWII that movies were portraying Germans sympathetically, and there have been scads of such films since, but there still have been almost no sympathetic treatments of the Japanese. Today, I think we have a more nuanced view of the Iraqis. This is complicated in part by the fact that they are nominally our “allies”, though many of them are clearly enemies, and by the fact that the “terrorists” we are supposedly there to fight were not from Iraq. (Certainly the depiction of Al Qaeda and the nebulous “Islamofascists” is as uni-dimensional as that of the Japanese in WWII.) But there are films like Three Kings which clearly are sympathetic to non-white, non-Christians from a hostile nation. More importantly, in public discussion there is a visible strain, now weaker, now stronger, of recognition that the interests and concerns of common people are equally real and equally human on both sides of the conflict. In fact, there are already projects intended to bring the faces and voices of ordinary Iraqis before the American public; we have not had to wait 62 years to reach that degree of empathy this time. I think that’s a hopeful sign.
* Trivia Question: Guess which four. (Will names one in the article - probably the one you can guess. For the remaining three, I could only come up with two names. One of them was right, the other was not on his list.** The other two films that were on the list I had never heard of.)
** Trivia Challenge: There must be more than four. Name WWII films other than those on Hunter’s list that show the Japanese as ordinary human beings (not ones that glorify Japan - just ones that acknowledge the war was fought by ordinary, mostly decent, people on both sides).
February 26th, 2007
|
General, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, Fiasco |
2 comments
Jonah Goldberg of the NRO “Corner” (aptly described once as “Lucianne Goldberg’s idiot kid”) recently took issue with the question of military deaths in Iraq. Quoting with approval, and no trace of critical faculty, an ill-informed - or just dishonest - Op-Ed in the New York Sun by Alicia Colon, he blindly accepted her claim that the death total was even higher under Clinton and said he’d “like to know more”.
My homie, and occasional Lean Left commenter, Brooklynite, obliges him here:
The first thing worth knowing about the numbers is that they compare total military deaths in Clinton’s first term with Iraq War deaths under George W. Bush. All told, there were 5,076 US military fatalities between 2003 and 2005, not 3,133 between 2003 and early 2007.
The second thing worth knowing is that deaths of US military personnel dropped steadily over the course of the Clinton administration, as they had under Reagan and George HW Bush. In 1981, Reagan’s first year in office, there were 2,380 US military deaths. In 2000, Clinton’s last year, there were 758. The military got steadily better at protecting the lives of its servicemembers during Clinton’s two terms in office, in other words, and Colon’s use of his first-term numbers as a point of reference deliberately obscures that fact.
The third thing worth knowing is that it’s not just combat deaths that rise in time of war. Military deaths by accident and illness doubled between 2000 and 2005, and homicides rose by a third. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed stresses on the military that don’t appear in combat fatality figures.
[follow the link and check out the highly revealing graph - hint: the huge rocket-trail upward on the right side is Shrub’s handiwork]
and here:
A lot of conservatives are adopting the line that the deaths from the Iraq War are comparable to what we’d see in peacetime, and in one sense they’re correct — a generation ago, we did see these kind of mortality figures in the peacetime armed forces. But those mortality rates weren’t acceptable then, and the military worked hard to bring them down.
The military is still a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. But — and I can hardly believe I have to say this — war is more dangerous than peace. In 2000, 758 American servicemembers died. In 2005, 1,951 American servicemembers died. Those aren’t comparable figures. They represent twelve hundred young Americans whose families are grieving them today. (And the statistics don’t speak to those who were grievously injured that year, or to the local dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Good work.
February 21st, 2007
|
General, Politics, Bloggin, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
one comment
Gregg Easterbrook makes a reasonable point, here, but I think he gets carried away with himself.
Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks [at the rate of 4% per year]. The No. 1 failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase. Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and, until last week, George W. Bush had all refused to face the issue of America’s low-mpg vehicles, which are the root of U.S. dependency on Persian Gulf oil and a prime factor in rising U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But now Bush favors a radical strengthening of federal mileage rules, and last week to boot became the first Republican president since Gerald Ford to embrace the basic concept of federal mileage regulation (called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard). . . .
Does 4 percent improvement per year sound too modest? According to the EPA, average actual fuel consumption of new vehicles sold in the United States is 21 miles per gallon. . . . Improve on 21 mpg by 4 percent annually for 10 years, and the number rises to 31 mpg. If the actual fuel economy of new vehicles were 31 mpg, oil-consumption trends would reverse—from more oil use to less.
This is a distinct advance, and it is something environmentalists and energy policy wonks have been screaming for for years. In fairness, that deserves to be recognized. But Easterbrook’s main point is that the press have been unfair in failing to fall all over Bush for these moderate steps, long overdue.
This should have been Page One headline material—PRESIDENT CALLS FOR DRAMATIC MPG REGULATIONS. Instead, most news organizations pretended Bush’s mpg proposal did not exist, or buried the story inside the paper, or made only cryptic references to it. In his 2006 State of the Union address, when Bush said America was “addicted to oil” but proposed no mpg improvements, critics rightly pummeled the president. Now Bush has backed the needed reform, and the development is being downplayed or even ridiculed. . . .
Bear in mind that since 1988, Republicans have doggedly opposed stricter fuel-economy rules, denouncing the CAFE system in venomous language as intruding on a supposed “right” to drive wasteful, large vehicles. . . . Now, George W. Bush has embraced the system of mandatory federal mpg standards, asking they become much stricter. For this he’s denounced!
Easterbrook attributes this to . . . (say it with me now) . . . liberal press bias. (”[M]ainstream news organizations and pundits are bought and sold on a narrative of Bush as an environmental villain and simply refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts the thesis. . . . [E]ditors and pundits feel Bush must be ridiculed on all scores . . . .”) But Easterbrook himself notes that it’s the GOP that has blocked any increase in CAFE standards from the beginning, and in fact refuses even to accept them as reasonable policy. Bush has proposed a first-year increase in average fuel efficiency of less than one mpg (while the proposed, delayed, minimal standards for SUVs do almost nothing about their increasingly poor performance). And the benefit to this supposedly heroic plan? Easterbrook calculates that it would finally end the growth of consumption of oil . . . in ten years. (Bush’s overall goal of a 20% total reduction in oil use, mainly by increasing gasahol usage - which is better than nothing, certainly - would move our total consumption to its lowest level since . . . 1991. Great. Let’s not end global warming, let’s just increase global warming at the rate at which it first began to be an obvious problem.) Easterbrook also notes that critics have emphasized that the plan makes no overt effort to address global warming as a goal - its rationale is stated entirely in terms of costs to consumers and foreign oil dependence - and in fact does not even mention global warming. Aside from oil consumption targets, its most important provisions - alternative energy and non-petroleum-powered vehicles - are unspecified and undefined. But Easterbrook can think of no reason for these criticisms than “press bias”?
These are all reasonable criticisms. The plan is a major improvement on stonewalling, oil-industry protectionism, global warming denial, shameless toadying to Saudi oil interests, and rampant anti-environmentalism. But since it was Bush himself who was doing the stonewalling, payoffs, denial, toadying, and destruction, why should he get credit for stopping? And the absolute benefits of the plan - not the degree of departure they represent from his grossly backward policies to date, but the actual degree of good they will finally do - are modest at best. Worse, they do almost nothing to stave off the potential disaster that is the gravest environmental problem of the carbon economy.
This is simply the Bush life story in a nutshell: constantly demanding, and receiving, special praise for the most minimally decent ordinary behavior, and for overcoming problems he himself created. What’s his accomplishment as “the environmental President”? That he’s no longer an obnoxious oil-company shill? (And frankly, the jury’s going to be out a long time on that one, too.) Recall that in the same speech, Bush proposed a plan to elminate the federal deficit - in the last year of his successor’s term in office - without ever mentioning that he had actually inherited a $127 billion surplus from Clinton when he himself took office! He now wants credit for reversing his own environmental destruction policies the same way he wants credit for eliminating his own deficit. In his seventh year in office, his popularity in the tank, having seen his party trashed at the polls through his own bungling, he has now proposed policies that have been blocked by his party for over 20 years and won’t make an immediate, or in the long term decisive, dent in the precise problem to which his entire family owe their wealth and which he has worked to increase throughout his business and political life. A guy who publicly mocks a death-row prisoner’s religious conversion now expects us to take this seriously?
There is a “Nixon to China” aspect of this whole farce: given the GOP’s entrenched anti-environmental, pro-big-business, and pro-oil stance, it may be that only a miserable failure oil company executive Republican President could remove the GOP roadblock to sane policy. But, as with Nixon and China, it was the GOP itself, and notably Bush, who created the anti-environmental mentality that made it impossible for anyone else to implement a reasonable policy. Why they - and Bush above all - constantly get praise for reversing their own stupid blunders I can’t imagine. Let’s be glad for this first step toward a better oil policy, but let’s not lose sight of why it took so long, what it took to force Bush to this point, and what its - deliberately imposed - limitations are.
UPDATE: It’s worse than I realized. Bush is not just demanding credit for undoing his own damage, he’s demanding credit for increasing the damage while lying about it. The actually policy proposal, as opposed to the State of the Union washjob, makes it clear that Bush is committing to nothing while attempting to ease restrictions on automobile manufacturers and eliminate the CAFE statute entirely. See comments.
January 30th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Economics, Environment, Media, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
4 comments
It has previously been noted that the US-imposed programs and legal requirements put in place in Iraq shortly after the invasion included universal, government-funded healthcare, weapons confiscation, and minimum-representation quotas for women and the various sectarian groups in the national legislature. But the Bush administration wasn’t content with merely providing the Iraqis socialized medicine, gun control, and affirmative action. Now they’ve got the WPA, too:
President Bush’s new Iraq strategy . . . [includes] a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects including painting schools and cleaning streets, according to U.S. officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative.
I’d like to see a law simply requiring that every program or funding initiative provided by the Bush administration to the Iraqi people must also be provided to the citizens of the United States (preferably on a pro-rata basis, but, hell, even just a straight $1 billion would be a better employment program than the zero we’ve got).
Why is what is obviously right for them out of the question for us? Why does the right wing’s empty rhetoric and bullshit ideological posturing not stand in the way of people’s needs only in cases where they can’t afford to fail, and why do such cases not include right here in the United States?
Hat tip: Dees Diversion
January 17th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Economics, Culture, Iraq, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
4 comments
There has been a wave of outrage, and rightly so, over a DoD official’s recent remarks impugning law firms that engage in pro bono defense work for “homeland security” detainees, and threatening them by encouraging corporate clients to withdraw their business from those firms. The accusations made were scurrilous and unAmerican, and the attempt to deny even the vestigial due process accorded these extra-legal prisoners by threatening their lawyers was uncivilized. No condemnation was strong enough.
Remarkably, for this administration, the individual at fault has attempted to acknowledge his error, take responsibility for it, and sort-of apologize. This may be a first; it’s certainly a shock. It deserves acknowledgment in return. But even here the disingenuousness and basic, root indecency of the administration and its personnel comes through, even in the face of an apparently sincere effort to the contrary.
Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, published this in the Washington Post today:
During a radio interview last week, I brought up the topic of pro bono work and habeas corpus representation of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Regrettably, my comments left the impression that I question the integrity of those engaged in the zealous defense of detainees in Guantanamo. I do not.
I believe firmly that a foundational principle of our legal system is that the system works best when both sides are represented by competent legal counsel. . . . I believe that our justice system requires vigorous representation.
I apologize for what I said and to those lawyers and law firms who are representing clients at Guantanamo. I hope that my record of public service makes clear that those comments do not reflect my core beliefs.
Though there are elements of the “non-apology apology” here, he appears to mean what he says. But this falls short of penance for his real faults in several ways.
Most notably, he pointedly apologizes only to the attorneys he slandered, for “giving the impression” that he questioned their integrity. He does not apologize to the detainees for attempting to deprive them of their already almost-negligible legal rights and to deny them legal representation before the most lawless and unconstrained tribunal since the fall of the Soviet Union. That was his real crime, and the criticism directed at him almost uniformly noted as much. His behavior toward the lawyers whose efforts have made “American justice” just slightly less a mockery than the Bush administration strives to render it was shabby, but his attempt to send political prisoners before a secret court on undisclosed evidence and with no legal representation was shameful, and criminal. But no member of the Bush administration can ever be caught treating its (nearly infinite list of) designated foes as human beings, or acknowledging their fundamental legal and human rights. By crafting his apology so evasively, Stimson makes it clear he would be happy to find some other way to return Bush’s extra-legal detainees to the absolute darkness they languished in before hundreds of brave lawyers battered the tiniest hole in their legal dungeons - he just agrees to do it more politely.
This evasiveness becomes frank disingenuousness when he says he “left the impression that I question the integrity” of the lawyers he threatened. As with all fake apologies, this pushes the blame onto the listener, away from the speaker: some people “got the impression”, when he said it was “shocking” to learn the names of lawyers representing extra-legal prisoners, and claimed they were “are receiving monies from who knows where” to represent those clients (almost all are working pro bono), that he meant something bad by that. Obviously it’s not his fault they got that impression; he’s not responsible for the meanings of the words he speaks.
It is a welcome change to see anyone in this administration admit fault of any kind, or to make the barest nod in the direction of due process. I actually started this post as an unreserved commendation of Stimson for his candor and decency. But as I read through the letter more carefully I realized I had been taken in by his mendacity, as he obviously intended. On first glance, I thought the letter was a full and frank admission and apology; instead it is carefully limited and fails to even mention the most egregious aspect of his error. He seems to regard his mistake as one of professional discourtesy - he never acknowledges or even seems aware that it was an attack on the law, as the foundation of civilization, itself. Beside this lack, his weasel-worded non-apology for others’ “impressions” is merely ordinary bad faith. But Stimson’s real fault is his contempt for justice and due process - a contempt that pervades the Bush administration and is nowhere addressed in an apology that only, and even then inadequately, acknowledges the surface irrelevancies of his wording and not the moral rot of his beliefs and values.
Try harder, Stimson. You’re still a schmuck.
Hat tip: Now here’s the right kind of stuff!
January 17th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Torture |
7 comments
Cenk Uygur of the Hufington Post comes a bit late to this realization, but he has it exactly right:
Never has there been a public official more unequipped to be President of the United States of America than George W. Bush. The man is simply not up to the job. Even if he really wanted to be or cared to be an effective president, he … could … not … do … it.
He can’t do it on a boat, he can’t do it with a (pet) goat. He can’t do it in the Green Zone, he can’t do it back at home. This man cannot be a good president, Sam-I-Am.
He flat out does not have the intellectual capacity to carry out the requirements of the job.
December 11th, 2006
|
General, Politics, Economics, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Katrina, News & Current Events, Fiasco |
5 comments
Ted asked a very interesting question in the comments to my review of Fiasco:
All I will say is I wonder if the Bush Admin had had perfect knowledge and planned a flawless post-war operation, would the outcome have been substantially different from the current situation? I believe that the very concept of a quick and relatively painless conversion of Iraq to a democratic state is so flawed that the implementation details hardly matter. The basic premise is a pipe dream. (Which in no way is a defense of Bush.)
I have to agree with Ted. The Bush Admin and the culture of the Army made it worse, but this was always doomed to fail. I can think of no example from history that suggests that imposing a new democratic government, unbidden and unasked, has ever succeeded. Germany and Japan do not really count, both because the Germans and Japanese acquiesced to the new governments and because both nations thought they needed the protection of their conquerors in order to prevent absorption into the Soviet sphere. Panama might come closest, but in that case the democracy was being restored and there was already a visible, significant protest movement that was both legitimate in the eyes of all Panamanians and accepting of US help.
Invading a country causes death and destruction and death and destruction tends to anger people. The very process of invading creates the seeds of resistance. At a minimum, people who suffered in the invasion are going to want the invaders gone as quickly as possible. They are also going to hold the invaders responsible for every aspect of national security and prosperity. Any failures in those areas will further anger already angry and impatient people. Being invaded and conquered so easily will also cause feelings of resentment and humiliation, feelings that will be amplified every time the invaders do anything that could be construed as insulting or insensitive to the occupied country. If the invaders are from a different culture, they will almost inevitably do something that is insulting to the occupied culture.
In short, a transformative invasion like the one favored by Bush and the neo-cons depends upon an inhuman level of perfection on the part of the invaders and an attitude of forgiveness and a degree of patience that human beings seldom display. One story from Fiasco highlights the problems. From page 178, describing a patrol:
Mohammed Abdullah, standing with his neighbors, insisted he would fight the Americans. … “We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We’re different from the West.” As he watched Keeling and the others pass, he called Baghdad a fallen city, a hint of humiliation in his words. It was akin, he said, to the invasion of 1258 of Hulagu, the grandson of Ghengis Khan, whose destruction of Baghdad ended its centuries of glory. The Americans, he said, let the National Library burn and permitted looters to ransack the National Museum of Antiquities. “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture,” he said, “and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely.”
At 11:30, it was 103 degrees as the patrol arrived at the Rami Institute for Autistic and Slow Learners … The soldiers lingered for more than half an hour. When they emerged [from the classrooms] they looked pleased with themselves. They liked helping the school. They admired its teachers, and their hearts went out to the children.
But outside, neighbors took a very different view of the troops’ visit to the women who run the school… [T]hey suspected the American soldiers were having sex with the female teachers inside. “Only God knows,” Ahmed said. “I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. But I’ve hears about things.”
“We don’t like it,” said Din, wagging his finger. “We don’t like it.”
At 12:40 the patrol passed the two green Bradley’s and stepped through the Army base’s concertina wire… “They love us,” concluded Spec. Seneca Ratledge, the medic, a soldier of Cherokee heritage from Riceville, Tennessee.
August 30th, 2006
|
Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Books, Fiasco |
13 comments
Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, is an important if unpleasant book. Its title captures its essence perfectly: this is the tale of the disaster that the American occupation of Iraq has become. In clear, precise and often powerful prose Ricks methodically builds the case that the American occupation has failed and the many reasons, causes, and poor decisions that lead to that failure. He has interviewed Americans at all levels of the occupation, in both civilian and military circles, and skillfully connects the decisions made in Washington and Baghdad to the daily failures and struggles of US troops and civilian administrators. Ricks spends some time on the failures of Congress and the press, but failures of the occupation of Iraq had two parents: the Bush Administration and the United States Army.
When the history of the Iraq occupation is written, it will largely be the story of the failures of the Bush Administration. And those failures were the direct result of the decisions made by George W. Bush. Put bluntly, the Iraqi occupation was doomed by decisions made in the White House. It was the White House and the neo-cons advisors in it that based their post war planning, such as it was, on ridiculously optimistic scenarios. There is nothing wrong with optimism, but the Administration did not admit for the possibility of pessimism. As a result, the roses and cheers of Paul Wolfowitz’s imagination dictated that the occupation be built around the assumption that the Iraqis would quickly fill the power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and as a result, the occupation would require far fewer troops than the invasion. Of course, the opposite was predictable, predicted, and came to pass. For most of the occupation, the number of troops either equaled or surpassed the number used to topple the regime.
During this time, the Department of Defense and the State Department were in something very much like a war. The working relationship between members of the two departments was beyond awful, verging into adversarial. More than once Ricks described members of one department or the other rejecting out of hand valid information form the other side simply because it came from the other side. Towards the end, Rumsfeld and Powell appeared to openly despise on another. And Bush did nothing to bring the two camps together. As a result, the first CAP head was forced to leave behind talented and experienced State Department people when he went to Iraq. The Defense Department forced Garner to take to Iraq ideological hacks with no experience instead of accomplished diplomats. Iraq paid the price in terms of bugled reconstruction, corruption, and a loss of stability due to ideological correctness being placed far ahead of the needs of the Iraqis. The Heritage Foundation neophytes that ran the CAP invariably choose to attempt to transform Iraqi society along their notions of an ideal society over providing stability, security, and opportunity to the Iraqis.
As damaging as those failures were, however, much of the problems in the Iraqi occupation stemmed from the Administration’s original error: lying about WMDs and Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections.
Ricks doesn’t spend a lot of time in the build up to war, but he does clearly highlight when the Administration — generally in the form of Cheney or people who worked for Cheney — ether said things that it knew to be untrue or claimed intelligence support for contentions where such support was extremely tenuous or nonexistent. Colin Powell’s famous speech in front of the United Nations is the most prominent example of the way the Administration used half truths and deception to suggest a certainty that did not actually exist, but it was not the only one. And Ricks leaves no doubt that such deception happened on purpose. Those deceptive WMD claims and links to Al Qaeda hamstrung the US occupation form the moment they crossed the Iraqi border.
The initial invading forces were reluctant to destroy arms caches and weapons bunkers that they came across for far that they contained chemical or nuclear weapons and would thus cause fallout related deaths among US troops and Iraqi civilians. Those undestroyed bunkers become the armory of the insurgency, once it became clear that the US did not have enough troops to effectively guard those bunkers. In addition to facilitating the arming of the insurgency, the search for WMDs took intelligence gathering resources away from the fight against the insurgency, leaving the Army severely disadvantaged.
The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda provided a subtler kind of problem, one of attitude. Ricks talks to many soldiers, and details the actions of many more, than seemed to regard the Iraqis as the enemy from the moment they crossed the border. Instead of looking on Iraqis as victims of a totalitarian regime, many soldiers appeared to be suspicious of all Iraqi males under the assumption that some of them were involved with the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Obviously that worked against US forces attempts to win over Iraqis to their cause.
The Army, however, didn’t always seem to be interested in winning over Iraqis. The Army came out of Vietnam a broken institution, with poor morale and ever poorer discipline. In the sixteen years between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the officers of the Army did a remarkable job re-creating the Army. They took a beaten organization and turned it into perhaps the finest strike force the world had ever seen. But in doing so, they made two mistakes that would haunt the Iraqi occupation: they threw away everything that they learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam and they decoupled their operational planning from considerations of the operations political goals.
The Army that rose form the ashes of Vietnam was an Army built around overwhelming firepower and maneuverability. It was designed to destroy an opposing conventional army, and it was very good at it. But it seemed blind to the notion that it would be asked to fight counter-insurgency campaigns. The Army did not train its soldiers in how to deal with an insurgency in their day to day operations. Ricks paints a picture of an Army where counter-insurgency was, at best, an afterthought and at worst a never thought of at all. As a result, US forces were unprepared to deal with the reality of an insurgency. Some commanders - -such as the commander of the 101st Airborne — used their own instincts, intelligence, and common sense to great effect, leading to a relatively stable and supportive Iraqi population in their area of control. Others, such as the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, treated the Iraqis in the harshest, most punitive fashion possible and thus did the insurgency’s recruiting for it. Most commanders were somewhere in the middle, but somewhere in the middle generally meant that the wrong decisions were made far too often.
Classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a troops to live among the populace to gain a feel for the situation and the people and for force to be a last resort and used in a minimal fashion when required. In general, US forces concentrated on force protection over Iraqi protection, which lead to housing US units far form contact with ordinary Iraqis, the use of overwhelming firepower in response to any provocation, and rules of convey conduct — speeding, brushing aside civilian traffic, firing on civilian cars that got too close — that worked counter to the need to win over the Iraqi people. With almost every action most US commanders took, they made their job much more difficult.
But those decisions were generally in line with US doctrine. And that was largely the fault of the decision to treat wars as nothing more than the clash of arms. The US army lost the connection between military means and the larger war aims. Without that connection, it was too easy for US forces to fall into the trap of thinking only about the means to destroy the enemy without given proper consideration to second and third order effects of those action on the larger political goals of the conflict. Part of the reason that they post war planning on the part of the Army was so poor was that the culture of the Army just assumed that after the battle their troops would be drawn done and sent home. Their was little conception of what happened after the opposing force had been driven from control because that was the realm of politics and the modern US army spent very little time thinking about those issues. And that lead directly to things like Abu Gharib.
Absent the connection between tactics and the political strategy, US forces generally concentrated on the tactic that brought about the immediate victory as quickly as possible with the smallest risk to US personal. An army whose officers were accustomed to thinking in terms of how their tactics affected the broader political goals would have made very different decisions. Officers who knew that the goal was to convince the Iraqis to join the new Iraq would respond with much less force, far fewer mass roundups, and much more culturally sensitive searches and interactions with locals. The Army as a whole would have been prepared to quickly process prisoners and so the overpopulation that lead to the command breakdowns in Abu Gharib would not have happened. In those places where the commanders did think in larger, political terms, the US occupation went much, much smoother than in places were officers could not shake off the prevalent military culture.
The Iraqi Occupation stands a very good chance of being remembered as the greatest strategic disaster in American history. Ricks book is a wonderful history of the early years of the occupation. It is not perfect, but its flaws do not overwhelm the scholarship of the book. Ricks is a military reporter, so the majority of his interviews are with military personal. To a certain extent that is a justifiable decision. US soldiers were in much more direct and constant contact with Iraqis and thus were both the prime movers on the US side and the people best able to know what was happening in the country as a whole. However, the discussion of reconstruction could probably have benefited somewhat with a few more voices form inside CAP in Baghdad. And the book cannot be said to be a complete history of the time because it does not deal with the Iraqi side of the conflict, for obvious reasons. Ricks does make a good effort to get the opinions and thoughts of Iraqi citizens into the discussion, but Iraqi voices are still too few and they are often filtered through the recollections and biases of US officers and soldiers. And, of course, there is nothing from the Iraqi insurgency, meaning that how the insurgents reacted to US actions is missing.
These small problems aside, Fiasco is a marvelous book. It takes a complex subject with hundreds of players and dozens of conflicted motivations and teases out the story of why the Occupation has gone so poorly. It is written too soon to be the last word on the history of the occupation and invasion, obviously, but it is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what has gone wrong and what problems in our political and military cultures need to be addressed in order to prevent a repeat of this fiasco. Thomas Ricks has written a book that all other serious histories of the Iraqi Occupation will be built upon.
August 21st, 2006
|
Reviews, Writing, Iraq, Terrorism, Books, Fiasco |
4 comments